From Frat House to Wing Empire: The Matt Friedman Story

Legal firm

He Started a Wing Delivery Business in His Frat House Kitchen. Every Bank Said No. His Parents Didn't.

The kitchen closed at 6:30pm every night.

Matt Friedman was a college student at the University of Florida in 1993, living in a fraternity house with a full commercial kitchen that sat empty from dinnertime until the next morning. He looked at that kitchen and thought: delivery. Late night. Wings.

He'd been studying Domino's Pizza. Not eating it — studying it. The whole premise was delivery to a campus in Michigan, built from almost nothing, turned into a national brand. Matt figured the same logic applied to wings. College students didn't eat breakfast. Their lunch was breakfast. Their dinner was lunch. And their third meal of the day happened after 10pm, when almost nothing was open and almost nothing delivered.

He went to the fraternity president — a good friend — and asked if he could use the kitchen to test an idea. Then he had a phone line installed, made some fliers, drove to Sam's Club for wings, fries, sauces, and one type of Coke. Not Diet Coke. Not Sprite. Just one type of can.

Total investment: $500.

The demand showed up fast. People saw a flier that said wings, late night, free delivery, and the reaction wasn't skepticism. It was: I'm in. Guerrilla marketing on a college campus in 1993 — no social media, no algorithms, just boots on the ground and door hangers — and within four months he had enough proof to know the model worked.

Then he walked into twelve banks and got told no by every one of them.

The $50,000 Parental Loan (And the Graduation Clause)

No credit history. No net worth. No assets. A one-page concept document, some basic financials, and a four-month test run out of a fraternity kitchen. That's what Matt brought to a dozen banks in 1994.

None of them said yes.

He's said in interviews since that he's glad they didn't. The experience taught him something that most founders learn the hard way: traditional lending isn't built for someone with a good idea and no track record. Friends, family, angels — that's the pool for early-stage founders who need someone to bet on them personally, not on a spreadsheet.

For Matt, that was his parents. Middle class family. Not wealthy. And they said yes to $50,000 — which in 1994 was a real sum of money to put on the line for a kid who wanted to deliver wings.

Two conditions. First: it was a loan, not a gift. It would be paid back whether the business succeeded or failed. Second: he had to graduate first. He did. And the first Wing Zone storefront opened near the University of Florida campus in 1994.

He found the location by looking for failure. There was a small restaurant that had closed down close to campus. The hood exhaust system was already in. The bathrooms, electrical, plumbing — all there. He put in equipment, slapped a sign on the building, made some repairs. Lipstick on a pig, he calls it. It was enough.

The Partner Who Made It Possible

Adam was a fraternity brother. Then Matt's first manager. Then, eventually, a 50/50 partner in Wing Zone for the entire 27-year run of the business.

They are still best friends. In 27 years they had fewer than five real arguments.

Matt says the reason is simple: they didn't do the same things. Adam was meticulous with numbers, great at technology, wired for documentation and systems. Matt was the visionary, the salesman, the one who could walk into a new city and figure out how to make a restaurant work. Sales and marketing on one side; finance and operations on the other. No overlap, no friction, no competition for the same lane.

Most co-founder breakdowns happen because two people who are too similar end up stepping on each other. Matt and Adam found a partnership that worked because they each had exactly what the other didn't. Twenty-seven years is evidence enough that it was the right call.

Inc. 500, Seven Stores, and the Domino's of Wings

The model was clear from the beginning: college towns. Late night. Delivery. Same thing Domino's had proven, but wings instead of pizza.

He expanded by pulling his best manager from each location and taking that person with him to open the next one. Move to a new city, set up the operation, stay for about six months, then hand it off and move again. He describes the decade between starting and franchising as traveling like a lunatic.

Seven company-owned stores across Florida and Georgia, all near major college campuses. Enough volume and enough systems that when customers started coming in and asking if Wing Zone was a franchise, Matt started hearing it as a signal instead of just a compliment.

They made the Inc. 500. Bootstrapped. No outside investors. Just a $500 start and two guys who knew what the other was good at.

Franchising Isn't the Restaurant Business

In 2001, Wing Zone started franchising. And Matt learned immediately that he had started an entirely different company.

Running restaurants and running a franchise system require completely different skills, different teams, different metrics, and different mindsets. He and Adam made the decision to split the two operations: separate companies, separate staffs, same 50/50 ownership of each. Adam ran the restaurant chain. Matt ran the franchise company.

It was the right call. But it still didn't make the franchise side easy.

Two and a half years. That's how long it took before the franchise company showed a dollar of profit. Forward investing the whole time, building the system, signing franchisees, supporting their openings, developing training and supply chain — all of it funded by revenue from the restaurant side. Most people who get excited about franchising their concept don't understand that math. They think the royalties start rolling in immediately. They don't.

His first franchisees were his own store managers. People who had worked inside the system, understood it, believed in it, and wanted a piece of it. That's the smart play: your best internal operators already know the product works. They're not taking a leap of faith. They're taking a calculated next step.

Franchising did eventually become the recurring revenue machine it's supposed to be. But the path was longer and harder than anyone tells you it will be.

The Rhino and the Thick Skin

Matt's mascot for himself is a rhino. Thick skin.

Being a franchisor, he explains, means accepting something psychologically uncomfortable: when your franchisees succeed, they take the credit. When they struggle, they point at you. You are simultaneously the brand they signed up for and the system they blame when it doesn't work.

That dynamic never goes away. You have to go in knowing it, accept it, and build the skin for it. The reward isn't gratitude. The reward is watching someone build a business that wouldn't have existed without what you created — and occasionally, when a franchisee really breaks through, getting a glimpse of the impact.

He sold Wing Zone in 2021. Twenty-seven years from frat house to exit.

Epic Wings and the Case for Staying Regional

His current company is Epic Wings. Forty years old. Thirty-five locations. All Southern California. No freezers in any restaurant — fresh cut fries, fresh bread, fresh everything. They do famous breadsticks alongside the wings.

He took the CEO role because the brand had something he respected: discipline about what it was and where it operated. No national ambitions. No franchise expansion to chase a bigger number. Just a powerhouse in its region, built on consistency, that had survived four decades because it knew exactly who it was.

That last part is the thing Matt keeps coming back to — in restaurant businesses, in franchise systems, in any consumer-facing operation. Consistency beats quality. Not because quality doesn't matter, but because customers don't return to the best restaurant they've ever been to. They return to the one that's the same every time. The place that never disappoints even if it never astonishes.

He admits Wing Zone struggled with this. Some nights they were transcendent. Some nights they weren't. Epic Wings, in his view, doesn't have that problem. And that's why he's there.

What Stuck With Me

Matt Friedman spent 27 years in the same business. That's not a pivot story. It's not a serial entrepreneur story where you get bored and move on to the next thing every few years. He stayed in the game, through the hard parts and the plateau parts, long enough to see what persistence actually produces.

The frat house kitchen and the Sam's Club run are fun origin details. But the real story is in the decade of traveling like a lunatic to open stores, the two and a half years of franchise losses, the partner he never fought with because they understood each other well enough to stay in their lanes.

Most entrepreneurs want the exit before they've earned it. Matt built something that took 27 years to exit because it took 27 years to be worth what it was worth. That's not a failure of ambition. That's what it actually looks like when you build something real.

Recorded live at a Startups with Stu retreat. More at startupswithstu.com.

Related blogs

She Did WHAT to Get a CEO’s Attention?! | Episode 60

She Threw Rap Battle Parties for Thousands of Students. Lost All Her Money on a Supplement Brand. Then Built a Marketing Agency That Got a Response From the CEO of Caterpillar. Bianca McDownriver showed up to the Startups with Stu retreat in Highland Park, Idaho, wearing heels. In the mountains. In the dirt. She'd also spent seven minutes the previous night cooling off in a lake that had sixteen inches of ice under it, couldn't sleep until 2 a.m. because she was too energized, and then delivered one of the sharper conversations this show has produced. She runs Box Voice, a marketing agency she's operated for eleven years out of Texas. Her clients range from stormwater compliance software to termite control to ERP systems. Mr. Beast's team called. She took the meeting. She doesn't do niches. And before all of that, she was a freestyle rapper, a supplement brand founder who went broke, and a college party promoter who figured out that the real money wasn't at the door. It was from the apartment complexes. This was recorded live at a Startups with Stu retreat in Highland Park, Idaho. It's the kind of episode you don't fully appreciate until you go back and catch everything you missed the first time. The Car Wash, the Piano, and the First Taste of Selling Bianca's first job was teaching piano in high school. Not because she was passionate about music education. Because she refused to ask her parents for money. She's always been that way. "I've never felt like it was anyone's job to provide," she said. She moved a lot growing up, picked up students wherever she landed, and just kept teaching. Then came Forever 21 and Victoria's Secret. Fine jobs. Unremarkable. But the one that changed things was a car wash. She was supposed to stand at the register and check people out. The owner pulled her aside and asked if she'd go out to the lot and upsell customers to the highest detail package. She was young, high school young, and said sure, why not. The base wash was $39. The full detail was $200. She started closing people on the upgrade, over and over, and something clicked. If she could convince a stranger to spend five times more than they planned to spend on their car, what else could she do? That's a clean origin story for a career in sales and marketing. Most people don't find that thing until their late twenties. Bianca found it in a parking lot. Driven Supplements: The Business That Cost Her Everything and She Still Won't Throw Away At BYU Idaho, she noticed a gap. The school was in Rexburg, students were serious about the gym, and there was nowhere to buy supplements. She'd grown up around athletes. Both brothers competed. She understood protein intake, pre-workout, creatine. So she started a brand called Driven Supplements and went to work trying to formulate her own product. Here's what nobody tells you about making a protein powder: it is extremely hard to make one that tastes good and stays high-protein and low-calorie. She burned through money trying. She was the only one putting in cash. Her business partner Nick knew all the gym guys, so he had the connections, but the financial investment was all Bianca. She went to manufacturing for clothes when the supplement formula wouldn't come together, thinking margins would look better there. She was wrong again. She manufactured in the United States, which crushed her profit margins, even though she kept selling out every run she made. And then Nick took the cash they'd made together and bought an engagement ring for his girlfriend. His explanation: "Oh Bianca, you always know how to make money." She nearly signed a lease on a storefront that was running five grand a month. Had a gut feeling. Walked away. Driven eventually died after she left BYU. To this day, she still carries the Driven merchandise when she moves. Her sister-in-law asked her once why she lugged around a failed company's gear. Because it's a reminder. Of why she failed, what she learned, and what she'd do differently now. She wears the logo and means it. That's not nostalgia. That's respect for the fight. Hundreds of Students Paying $10 to Watch Other Students Rap Here is something the transcript reveals that is genuinely unexpected: Bianca McDownriver is a freestyle rapper. She organized freestyle rap battle events at BYU Idaho when there was essentially nothing like it happening in Rexburg. Her first one was at Northgate apartments. She packed the space. Students paid $10 to watch other students battle on a mic. She got Kiwi Loco to bring ice cream. She got a local shop to sell drinks. It was scrappy and loud and people loved it. That one night at Northgate grew into block parties. She blocked off streets near Sammy's ice cream, brought bands and rappers from Utah, rented venues like the Zone, and spent five years throwing events almost every weekend. Thousands of people at the peaks. She brought a waterslide to the sand dunes once, pumped water to the top, and let it run. She got fined for putting a grill on the sand because she didn't know that wasn't allowed. She made friends with the park ranger, who took her on ATV rides around the dunes while the party ran itself. She charged entrance fees. But the real money was somewhere else entirely. Apartment complexes wanted to be in front of students. So she sold them tables at her events. They'd set up, offer move-in discounts, get signups on the spot. She charged them by the semester. That became the actual business. Five years of it. And somewhere in the middle of all this, she also did five corporate internships. Because if you're going to run two businesses in college, why not add five internships. She says it started her love for marketing, but the framing she uses is better: she's not in the marketing business. She's in the business of people and attention. Learning how to get someone to say yes. That's the whole thing. The $4,000 Purse, the Ex-Google Guys, and the Body Language That Closed the Deal After college, she started her agency. It was just her. No clients, no portfolio, no office. She was finding leads on Craigslist. Actual Craigslist, where people would post that they needed someone to run a marketing campaign. She'd pray the person wasn't a serial killer and go meet them. Two former Google employees were starting a consulting firm in Dallas. She found the post, set the meeting, showed up to a breakfast spot downtown. She had nothing to show them except herself. No case studies. The rap battles weren't going to close this one. So she dressed for the meeting. She'd bought her first real purse, a designer bag that cost close to four grand, with her own money. She walked in with it. One of the two men had studied body language and human psychology. He noticed everything. She sat open, palms visible, posture receptive. She closed the deal. She's been teaching body language ever since. The basics: arms crossed signals you're closed off, even if you don't mean it. Open palms read as receptive. Power stance before a pitch changes how the room receives you, because there's real psychology behind how people process your physical presence before they process your words. She read Influence by Robert Cialdini. She studied Chris Voss, the CIA hostage negotiator who talks about negotiating with terrorists and why your body often communicates before your words do. She came across the Amy Cuddy TED Talk on power posing that went viral. Her point, and it's a good one: these things feel minor until you realize the other person is reading them whether you intend them or not. You can ignore that or you can use it. The Unscripted Video to the CEO of Caterpillar Three years ago, Bianca started doing video outreach. Not produced, polished, scripted video. The opposite. She walks outside, holds her phone up like a selfie, and talks to whoever she's trying to reach. No ring light. No script. Walking and talking. She was working with a client that builds agile software development pods and wanted to get in front of large enterprises. Their target was Paul, who was then CEO of Caterpillar. They'd been trying to reach him for a long time. Nothing worked. Bianca said she'd send a video. The CEO of her client company laughed. Called it unprofessional. Told her not to do it. She did it without telling him. She sent the video from her own email, not the client's. Walking outside. Selfie angle. She stumbled over words, messed up the pitch, thought about re-recording, and decided against it. Human error is relatable. Perfection is not. Seven minutes later, Paul replied. His email said he'd never seen anything like it. That the format caught his attention specifically because it was different from every other polished sales outreach he received. He corrected her on his name and on a word she'd gotten wrong. He told her they couldn't move forward because they had an existing third-party vendor for software development integration. But he also told her: don't stop what you're doing. Keep being different. Keep making the videos. That email is framed in her office. She looks at it when she feels like she's failing. The tool she uses is Hippo Video. $49 a month. The email shows up in the recipient's inbox with a small animated GIF preview of her face. It's slightly strange. That's the point. Strange gets opened. 65 Miles an Hour. A Drunk Driver. And Three Things That Flashed Before Her Eyes. When Bianca was 18, driving from Texas to BYU Idaho, she T-boned a drunk driver who ran a red light in Farmington, New Mexico. She was going 65 miles an hour. Her best friend was in the passenger seat. The airbag wrecked her face. Bloody nose, black eye. Her friend broke her nose. The man she hit went into a coma. She walked away with a banged-up knee. In the seconds before she knew how it would end, three things went through her mind. First: had she told her mom, dad, brothers, and sisters how much she loved them? Second: when she crossed over, would God accept her, or had she spent her life going the wrong direction? Third: her bucket list. All the things she'd wanted to do and hadn't done yet. It would have died with her in that car. She's been living differently ever since. Not recklessly, but urgently. She travels. She does the things on the list before she talks herself out of them. She crossed most of her bucket list off before 30. Her advice to the younger people in the room at the retreat: "What would your business look like if you chose to wake up tomorrow and live with urgency in everything that you do?" She's not asking it as a productivity question. She's asking it as a mortality question. And those are different things entirely. She also said she believes in 360-degree success. Not just business. Family, health, friendships, all of it. Business success that costs you everything else is just a different kind of failure. What Stuck With Me Most entrepreneur interviews have a version of the same arc: humble beginning, struggle, breakthrough, lesson, success. Bianca's story hits those marks, but she keeps stopping to talk about the people around her. The students who came to the rap battles. The park ranger who took her on ATV rides. Garrett, her husband, who texts back "ok." with a period. She keeps noticing people, and that's not incidental to her success. It's the whole engine. The other thing that stuck: she carries the Driven Supplements merch everywhere she moves. That failed company from fifteen years ago. Her sister-in-law thinks it's strange. Bianca thinks it's necessary. There's something worth holding onto in that, about how you treat the things that didn't work. Whether you bury them or carry them forward as evidence that you showed up and fought. She said she could die tomorrow and have zero regrets. That's not a motivational line. From everything she described, she means it. Recorded live at a Startups with Stu retreat. More at startupswithstu.com.

Apr 08, 2026

The Buyer’s Perspective: How to Build a Business Worth Acquiring

He Locked the Doors on 40 Years of Work. Didn't Sell. Just Walked Away. Stu knew a dentist from church in Arizona. Ran a practice for decades. Built something real. Then one Sunday he walked into services and said he'd retired. Stu was excited for him. Asked who he'd sold to. Nobody. He didn't sell. He just closed the doors. Stu said he almost cried. He wasn't being dramatic. He was thinking about the decades of early mornings and hard decisions that went into building a practice worth buying — and the fact that this man had no idea it had a number attached to it. No broker. No conversation. No second opinion. Just a lock on the door and forty years walking out with him. Jason Morris has heard this story in different forms almost every week since he started looking at founder-built businesses to acquire. Rich Jarvis has spent twenty-plus years in real estate capital and has watched the same thing happen on the property side. Neither of them is shocked anymore. But neither of them is okay with it either. That's the conversation they came on Startups with Stu to have. The Whiteboard Week That Started Everything Rich and Jason didn't meet through a deal. They were introduced through Jason's sister-in-law. Rich was running Epic Capital Funds. Jason had just spent 14 years as a portfolio CEO — the person a private equity firm puts inside a company to run it, hit the metrics, and get it to exit — and was ready to get on the other side of the table. They flew to Boise. Spent a week in front of a whiteboard. Just the two of them, pulling ideas out of their heads and onto the board, erasing it, starting over, photographing it, going again. All the things they'd each learned the hard way, all the frameworks they'd built separately, all the instincts they hadn't had language for yet — it all went on that board. Friday afternoon they got in the elevator. Shook hands. Went to the Boise State-Nevada game. Got hot chocolate at Shari's afterward. Impact Equity Partners was born. What aligned them wasn't the capital structure or the deal thesis. It was something harder to find: a shared view of what business is actually for. The stewardship you carry for employees, customers, vendors. What freedom of purpose means when you've actually built something. You can't manufacture that kind of alignment. You either find it or you don't. What $830 Million Looks Like From the Inside Rich started buying real estate in 1998. His first debt fund was 2004. Between 2008 and 2011, he lost everything. Multiple properties. A couple of airplanes. Three years to sell off every asset. He talks about it plainly: it was hard. It taught him things he couldn't have learned any other way. Epic Capital Funds launched five years ago, initially as the capital arm of a development company. Within the first year Rich bought out the partners and took it independent. Today: $830 million in assets under management, $3.4 billion in the pipeline over the next 18-24 months. For founders who haven't spent time in this world, those numbers need translation. Assets under management is the total value of all the projects currently in play. Pipeline is the estimated project costs of deals that are in process but haven't closed yet. Not all of that pipeline goes through. Entitlement alone on a Lake Tahoe hotel project they're working on took nine years — it's the first hotel to be approved in Tahoe City in over sixty years. Some deals die in due diligence. Some don't pencil. You have to have the discipline to walk away even after spending real money to get there. The lesson Rich would give any founder thinking about scale: the most important time he spends each week is away from his desk. He calls them clarity breaks. Out of the office, asking himself two questions: what do I need to start doing, and what do I need to stop doing. Not every week brings a big answer. But without that space, you end up stuck in the weeds, unable to see the business from above it. The Buy Box and the 3,000 Companies Jason spent 14 years as a portfolio CEO before starting Impact Equity Partners. The job, for anyone unfamiliar: you're the operator a PE firm puts inside an acquired company to run it day-to-day. Hit the metrics. Manage the debt. Scale it. Get it to an exit. He did that across multiple companies over more than a decade, accumulating, in his words, battle wounds, scars, and sleepless nights of trying to figure out how to get through the hard. Now he's the buyer. And he and Rich have reviewed over 3,000 companies this year alone. Early on, they cast wide. Deals in Maine, Oregon, Florida, Texas. They were hungry and the buy box was loose. A few months of that taught them what any serious acquirer eventually learns: discipline is the competitive advantage. You don't get better by looking at more deals. You get better by getting very specific about what you're actually looking for and saying no to everything that doesn't fit. Their target: cash-flowing businesses, ten years or older, that have stood the test of time without necessarily optimizing for growth. The ones where the founder spent the last decade on a comfortable cruise speed — making good money, not reinvesting aggressively, not pushing for the next level. Lifestyle businesses. The ones where, with a little capital, the right leadership, and some AI-assisted efficiency, you can move the needle fast. First acquisition: a hypoallergenic adhesive manufacturer in Oregon. Biggest customer base: the gel nail and acrylic nail industry. They bought it knowing they wanted to branch into other verticals and launch a direct-to-consumer brand. Instead of spending years building that DTC brand from scratch, they found one already operating in Arizona that their manufacturer already supplies — and they're merging it in. That's a bolt-on. Year three of DTC revenue, accelerated to year one. Currently under contract: an HVAC company and three non-emergency medical transportation companies that they'll merge into a centralized dispatch operation, with an auto repair company lined up to service the fleet. Revenue Is the Wrong Number to Watch One of the sharpest moments in this episode wasn't about a deal. It was about metrics. Rich made the point simply: when companies focus on revenue instead of profit, every employee is optimizing for the wrong thing. A salesperson chasing revenue will close deals that cost more to fulfill than they earn. They won't know they did it. Nobody will. Until you look at the profit line and realize you've been busy and broke at the same time. When profit becomes the shared metric, the whole team realigns. They start asking different questions about what it costs to produce, what they're commissioning, what the margin actually is on each customer relationship. Some customers, it turns out, cost more than they pay. Not every business has the courage to audit that list and say goodbye to the ones dragging the number down. Jason calls it the lever of control. Find your niche. Know your margins. Stay disciplined enough to get rid of what doesn't serve you. It sounds simple. It's one of the hardest things a growing company actually does. The Second Bite and the Dentist's Lost Exit The saddest story in this episode is a short one. Stu's dentist friend didn't know his practice was a sellable asset. He built it over decades, made a good living, and when he was done, he locked the door. No broker conversation. No valuation. No deal. Just gone. Jason and Rich have structured their acquisition approach specifically to make sure that doesn't happen to the people they work with. They call it the second bite of the apple. When they buy a business, they build deal structures that let the founder retain a piece of the equity going forward — so when Jason and Rich grow the business and sell it in five to ten years, the original founder gets another payday on top of what they already received at closing. It's not just generosity. It's alignment. You want the person who built the thing to care about what happens to it next. And it honors something real: those relationships, that reputation, those forty years of early mornings — they have value that deserves more than a locked door. Rich's goal is to impact 5,000 lives through what he builds. Jason measures his success by whether his relationships stand the test of time — the people he was in the trenches with, still rubbing shoulders with at 80 and 90. Tim McGraw's "Standing Room Only" came up. Go listen to it. The point is hard to argue with. What Stuck With Me This is a different kind of episode for Startups with Stu. Rich and Jason aren't scrappy first-time founders figuring things out in real time. They've been through it. They've lost everything and started over. They've run other people's companies and built their own. They've sat across from thousands of founders trying to figure out whether to buy what those founders built. What they've learned, distilled down: money is a tool, not the goal. Relationships are the compound interest that actually builds wealth over a lifetime. The right partner is worth more than the best deal. And every founder who's grinding right now toward some future exit should understand — someone like Rich and Jason is watching. The businesses that have stood the test of time, that have cash flow and reputation and a decade of proof — those are exactly what capital is looking for. Build something worth buying. Then actually sell it. Don't lock the door. Recorded live at a Startups with Stu retreat. More at startupswithstu.com.

Sep 21, 2026

They Almost Went Broke… Then Built a $31M Business | Episode 61

His Dad Welded a Shelf to Organize the Family Garage. They Turned It Into 120 Locations and a $31 Million Exit. Jared Newman didn't set out to build a company. He set out to clear some floor space. Five kids means a lot of gear. Skis, bikes, Christmas boxes, all of it piling up in the garage of a house in Boise. Jared had grown up on a dairy farm in Star Valley, Wyoming, learned to weld young, and spent 23 years working for someone else before deciding to do something about the mess. He built a shelf system. Simple, modular, designed to hang things off the floor and get long-term storage up and out of the way. Nobody planned to sell it. But then a neighbor asked where it came from. Then 20 employees at a backyard pool party walked into the garage and saw it. Three bids came out of that one party. The bishop of the local congregation came over, saw it, and said do my whole garage. Jared never ran an ad. He just did good work and let people talk. That was 2003. Adam Newman, Jared's son, watched all of it happen, got pulled in, and eventually built that shelf company into Monkey Bar Storage: 120 dealer locations across the country, a product line that grew to include cabinets, flooring, and a patented overhead rack system, and a revenue run rate of $31 million the year they sold. Eight-figure exit. This conversation was recorded live at a Startups with Stu retreat near Yellowstone National Park, and it's one of those episodes where the numbers are worth writing down. Year One: $46,000 In, $48,000 Out The first year, Gorgeous Garage did $46,000 in revenue and spent $48,000 doing it. On paper, a loss. In reality, Jared had a year's worth of severance pay from leaving his corporate job (23 years of service, two weeks per year) and had taken a line of credit on the house. So the lights stayed on, the inventory got built, and the equipment got bought. Year two: $96,000, with about $30,000 going home. Year three: $189,000, about $60,000 net. No advertising. No website until Adam helped build one in year two. Every single customer came from someone who'd seen the garage and told a friend. Adam was a reluctant participant at first. He came home from his mission, helped weld and install, told himself he'd earn money for college and move on. There was no way he was going to spend his life working for a shelving company. But then he watched the numbers double three years in a row without anyone trying to make them do that. And he started paying attention differently. Two Pickups, Two Laptops, and a $25,000 SBA Loan Adam saw the Salt Lake City opportunity before his dad did. He pushed Jared to invest in a better punch press, an $8,000–$10,000 piece of equipment that could cut and bend steel faster than anything they had. Jared didn't want to spend the money. Adam pushed until he said yes. Then he told his dad he wanted to open a dealership in Salt Lake. Same answer. Adam found a college roommate, a guy with a finance degree who'd spent nine months in banking and hated it, and the two of them walked into a bank with two old pickup trucks and two laptops as their only assets and asked for a $25,000 SBA loan. They got it. Ten thousand went to inventory from Jared, the rest to a trailer, tools, and a little advertising. Their first partial year in Salt Lake, April through December, they did $160,000. That was the moment Adam knew. Not hoped. Knew. He brought in another mission buddy to help run Salt Lake, deferred school, went down to get them started. He remembers sitting on the couch watching sports, putting plastic caps on hooks for hours every week because it was the only way to get enough product out the door. Goofy, manual, unglamorous. That's what getting a business off the ground actually looks like. The Consultant Who Embezzled $100,000 By the time the housing market started cracking in 2007, Gorgeous Garage had grown to four locations and was sitting at the franchising question. Two competitors, Premier Garage and Garage Tech, were franchising. The investment to buy in was $200,000–$250,000 per location, with a break-even they calculated at around two years. Too heavy. Adam, his dad, and their business partner built a board. They brought in Corey Smith, an investor who had been brand manager for Pillsbury's confetti cake, done big things with Heinz and Ocean Spray, then sold a chain of Idaho pharmacies to Walgreens. They brought in Bob, the former CEO of Rockford Fosgate. Both men told them franchising was the right direction. They took out a $150,000 SBA loan to pay a consulting group that specialized in building franchise disclosure documents. The legal work would take a year. At the eight-month mark, the deliverables weren't arriving. Staff at the consulting firm started disappearing. Adam tracked down a recently-let-go employee through an old cell number and called her cold. The owner had been embezzling. He was having an inappropriate relationship with a staff member. The company was closing. They weren't getting their documents. The attorney they went to was blunt: you're probably not going to get your money back, and I don't want to charge you to chase it. Walk away. Four of the other six companies caught in the same mess went under within weeks. Massage Envy was in the mix and survived because they were further along in the process. Adam's company had nothing to show for eight months of work and $100,000. Then the president of the national franchising association, a guy who had built a spray-on bed liner company to 800 franchises worldwide, heard about what happened. He flew out privately to Rexburg, Idaho, to meet with them. He sat across from Adam and told him: franchising isn't right for your business. Stick with the dealer model. And then he paid for an attorney in Denver to build them a proper dealer agreement. By April 2008, they'd sold their first real dealership. By the end of the year, they had eight locations. Reg Allen, and What Happens When You Find the Right Person For years, the dealer network grew organically. Then they hired a sales rep named Reg Allen, and the company changed shape. Before Reg: eight locations. After year one with Reg: twenty. After year two: forty-seven. Adam talks about Reg with the kind of gratitude that only comes from watching someone do something you couldn't have done yourself. Reg worked for four or five years and then went off to start his own thing. But in that window, he took the dealer model from a regional operation to something that could credibly call itself a national network. The lesson isn't "hire good salespeople," though that's true enough. The lesson is what Adam says right after: find good people, put them in the right spot, and let them shine. Don't micromanage the output. Put them where they're strong and get out of the way. The Secret Sauce Adam saved this for last, and it's worth the wait. Early on, the company commissioned a survey. Students called the first 500 customers and asked a few simple questions: do you remember who sold it to you, who installed it, would you recommend the company, is there anything about the product you'd change? The findings were unexpected. A lot of customers barely remembered the company name. Some called it "the yellow shelving stuff." But almost all of them remembered Jared Newman. By name. They'd say: Jared installed it. He hung everything up. He organized the whole garage. That was the tell. Customers didn't actually want shelving. They wanted an organized garage. Jared happened to sell them products that helped with that, but what made them rave was that he stayed after the install and put everything away. He hung the bikes. He sorted the bins. He did the thing they'd actually hired him for, even though it wasn't technically in the job description. Every competitor installed the product and left. Jared stayed an extra hour and finished the job the customer actually wanted done. When dealerships came to their five-day training in Rexburg, this was one of the last things taught and the most important: take the time to organize it. That's what they came for. The products just make it possible. And Adam, true to form, turned it into a revenue mechanism. Dealers were taught to tell customers upfront that the final bid might shift slightly depending on how much hardware the install required. When the customer walked out and saw a fully organized garage instead of just a set of shelves, they didn't complain about the extra hooks on the bill. They were looking at exactly what they wanted. Reviews stopped mentioning the product. They mentioned the experience. That's the gap. Every company has it, the distance between what they sell and what the customer actually came for. The ones that close it win. What Stuck With Me Adam tells this whole story without much drama. The embezzlement, the housing crash, the years of ramen and mac and cheese because the business couldn't pay anyone real money yet. He moves through it like it was just the cost of the thing, which I suppose it was. What stands out most is the survey. Five hundred customers, called one by one, asked a handful of questions, and what came back was: they don't remember your brand, but they remember your dad. That's not a marketing insight. That's a character insight. Jared Newman organized garages because he liked to, because he cared about the people whose garages they were, and that leaked into every interaction. Adam built the systems. Jared built the soul. Most companies only have one of those two things, and you can usually tell which one. The exit number is impressive. But the detail that stays with you is a farm kid from Wyoming who spent an extra hour after every job putting other people's stuff away, and how that turned out to be the whole secret. Recorded live at a Startups with Stu retreat. More at startupswithstu.com.

Apr 13, 2026

Subscribe for Updates

Subscribe to the Startups With Stu newsletter and get advice and stories sent straight to your inbox to help launch your business to the moon!